Kevin Barry

City of Bohane Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel AwardForty years in the future The once great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees infested by vice and split along tribal lines Ther

Title: City of Bohane

Author: Kevin Barry

ISBN: 9780224090575

Page: 352

Format: Paperback

Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel AwardForty years in the future The once great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines There are the posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the Northside Rises and the eerie bogs of Big Nothin that the city reShortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel AwardForty years in the future The once great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines There are the posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the Northside Rises and the eerie bogs of Big Nothin that the city really lives.For years, the city has been in the cool grip of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang But there s trouble in the air They say his old nemesis is back in town his trusted henchmen are getting ambitious and his missus wants him to give it all up and go straight And then there s his mother.City of Bohane is a visionary novel that blends influences from film and the graphic novel, from Trojan beats and calypso rhythms, from Celtic myth and legend, from fado and the sagas, and from all the great inheritance of Irish literature A work of mesmerising imagination and vaulting linguistic invention, it is a taste of the glorious and new.

One thought on “City of Bohane”

i do not know if you will like this book. usually, i am pretty good with the readers' advisory thing - i have this innate sense that automatically provides me with a list of names of people i think would appreciate the book, even if i didn't like it myself. call it a gift.but this one - i am genuinely at a loss. i know that i liked it, but i also know that i am a little bit damaged from having read it. like my brain has been mooshed a little and i have had a hard time readjusting it takes place [...]

This is my second experience of Kevin Barry - I read the equally compelling and original but very different Beatlebone in January. This one is a mixture of genres that I would normally steer well clear of - gangland thriller, dystopian fantasy, steampunk and graphic novel cliches abound. What carries it is the sheer vibrancy and humour of the language and the many cultural reference points that echo the likes of Joyce and Flann O'Brien.The setting is the fictional city of Bohane, on the west coa [...]

A place should never for too long go against its nature.Bohane. Mid-21st century after some un-named calamity which has affected Ireland and, apparently, Britain also. Perhaps the rest of the world? That is one of the conceits of this sci-fi steampunk something novel, the first by the wonderful Kevin Barry. Bohane is a wicked city. San Francisco of Barbary Coast fame in the 19th century. Everyone has a game, an angle to play and safety and security are part of the Lost-Time.There are no illustra [...]

Kevin Barry is well known for his short stories. He has a vivid imagination and is an excellent wordsmith, crafting some lovely, expressive prose. City of Bohane has received high praise from some of Ireland’s literary stars such as Roddy Doyle, Joseph O’Connor and Hugo Hamilton. I therefore had high expectations for Barry’s first novel. With the exception of the prose and some of the characterisation, for me, it failed to deliver. For the most part, the characters are difficult to identif [...]

Unusual and memorable bog-soaked poetry of a small Irish city filled with whores, gamblers, criminals, lonely hearts, and every other kind of down-and-outer. It's a city where whoever schemes the best lives the longest, and you can't trust anyone. It's a city that breaks people.Like drinking whiskey on a wintery day in a room with no heat, no light, and two-inch gapes between each wooden wall plank, Barry's book will shake you. It's a silent, desperate bellowing yellow to the moon. And it's also [...]

Kevin Barry is a genius. He is doing with his life and his gift exactly what he was put on this earth to do and continues the long and great line of Irish writers. His debut novel City of Bohane is an original and remarkable work of inventiveness.Set in the fictional and futuristic city of Bohane, somewhere in the West of Ireland in 2053, this is a dark and harrowing tale that is at turns horrific and stunning. For all the memorable and well-dressed characters, gripping plot twists, and brillian [...]

I love this book so far. The language in both the dialogue and the narration is fantastic. It just pops.And there's a lot of really meaty subject matter going on- Revenge, love, growing old, legacies Awesome.Also, I promise that my endorsement of this book is not affected by the fact that Graywolf is publishing the US edition in March 2012. Honest. This book is straight legit. I am, however, super excited that we're going to be publishing the US edition in March 2012.***Update***The end of this [...]

Profane, cinematic, hilarious, elegiac, brutal, poetic, original. I found City of Bohane to be all these things and more. The language is amazing. It took me a chapter or two to adjust to the vernacular Kevin Barry's characters employ, but it was well worth the effort. (You can view the author reading from the book at vimeo/28112291) At the center of the story is the struggle between rival gangs for control of the Irish city of Bohane, but there are also several fascinating subplots involving th [...]

I picked up City of Bohane expecting a book of gang warfare, of violent dystopian action perhaps in the expected mode of such stories (think Gangs of New York) in which events build to an brutal, climactic showdown. But City of Bohane isn't that book, it's far more than that, and reducing it "just" bloody violence would be a shame.Though there is plenty of violence, and more often the threat of it, that's not the point. Those scenes are often deemphasized when they arrive, overshadowed by the lo [...]

Sure it's another dystopian novel, but Barry mines the Celtic archetypes to create a truly original visionary work of genius and linguistic brilliance. What is it about Irish writers that transforms English prose into poetry? The neologisms, the dialect, the beautiful rhythms of a well-wrought line, the poetry of the everyday, the evocation of a place long gone in a future that will never be but might have been. Though the lives described are bleak, the descriptions themselves are beautiful. Joy [...]

While reading this book I was reminded of what it's like to read William Gibson's Neuromancer for the first time. At first it's a little unclear what the meat of the story is, but if you just hang on and let the rhythm and cadence of the prose take you for a ride, you will find yourself in a new and fascinating place. And what a place; Bohane is a weird and wild mash-up of Jamaican shanty-towns, Soviet tenements, and Little Italy and Chinatown. It's true that the plot and characters are lacking [...]

“Tricky the paths a long love might follow, like the spiral down twists of a raindrop on a windowpane.” Kevin Barry's first novel is underpinned by the story of such a love, but distinguished by its swagger and vitality.The City of Bohane is somewhere in the West of Ireland in the distant future, an Ireland that is real yet warped and seen through a dirty and distorted lens. The language of the book reflects the vision of the City – it too is bent and twisted, mixed with partly real, partl [...]

Whatever's wrong with us is coming in off that river. No argument: the taint of badness in the city's air is a taint off that river. This is the Bohane river we're talking about. A blackwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off the Big Nothin' wastes and the city was spawned by it and was named for it: city of Bohane.Set in a near-future (2053), vaguely post-apocalyptic fictional city on Ireland's west coast, City of Bohane is fueled by sex, drugs, and gang violence, written in language gorgeousl [...]

On my first attempt to read COB I was initially impressed by the poetic prose. Three chapters later I realised the majority sentences are simply lifted directly from local dialect with little artistic input. I laid the book down: returning recently after the IMPAC award hoping to uncover the error in my ways. My discomfort with the borrowed patois remained as it pervaded, adding little substance; although those unfamiliar with the Limerick dialect may gain value from its novelty. Where Barry's s [...]

What a tasty feast this was! I suspect this book will either be devoured with great relish or it will have you demanding to be excused from the table - pronto. Be prepared for something different from almost any other book you might pick up to read. A fresh idea, what a novelty! As the story opens, the city 'had taken to the winter like an old dog to its blanket'. Bohane is over-run with street gangs. The reader will need to hang tough with the street jargon and just roll with it. Context is kin [...]

Stupendous. A broken, tainted, nostalgic West-of-Ireland city thrashing and smoldering as it remembers the 'lost-time', Bohane is tribal, brutal, fashion-conscious (velveteen puffa jackets and vinyl brothel-creepers), sentimental, full of heart and completely heartless. The language is pure energy, the characters are vivid and real and the story is timeless. It seems that when it all breaks down, we will be mediaeval once again, writhing, dreaming and plotting in a real human society, face to fa [...]

City of Bohane, Kevin Barry's debut novel, won the prestigious international Impac prize in 2013, one of the my favourite literary prizes as one of the few that treats translated fiction on a par with English language originals (/review/list). And his 2nd novel, Beatlebone has been shortlisted for the equally excellent Goldsmiths Prize. So I came to this book with high expectations, albeit tempered by the detail of the Impac nomination which states that the novel "blends influences from film and [...]

This is a book that you will either love or hate. I did both!!! I read the first 2 chapters and really struggled with them, both in terms of the language (very broad Irish dialect and patois) and also just trying to find something - character or story - to start building the reading experience from. To be honest, if it wasn't for the fact that i "had to" read it for Book Club, I would not have persevered with this book. So I started again, and re-read the beginning, and kept going second-time ar [...]

As a high school teacher, I'm taking a summer class on on teaching reading and we reviewed a list of the 'pleasures of reading.' And the first two had to do with the pleasure associated with knowing the correspondences between letters and sounds and the pleasure of the sounds themselves as you read aloud. Barry's novel, for all it's atmosphere and impact in the literary circles, reminds me of those first two pleasures. Barry is mostly known as a short story writer, and it shows. On each page the [...]

Kevin Barry is going to be somebody. That's what I thought when I read his apocalyptic short story in The New Yorker, Fjord of Killary, a year or two ago. This sent me searching the web, where I found his previous short story collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, available from a small Irish literary press by way of an independent overseas bookseller. Kevin Barry already is somebody, I thought when I read those tales: He's an heir to William Trevor, like Banville and Toibin. But this one's ten [...]

Bohane, a city on the Irish coast fed by a sick black river, is crime ridden. But how can we call it crime if it is just a way of life? When everyone is actively engaged in a monstrous caricature of humanity, the dark manifesting in feints of genteel respectability? It's hard to see what value the Bohanites hold upon anything other than irrepressible self indulgence. Smoke and drink and carnality, amongst others is just parts in a day. People are people, they say, but the people of Bohane have b [...]

As I said in my recent review for ForeWord Magazine, this novel reminded me of the West Side Story, with the Jets and the Sharks replaced by rival gangs from the bogs and gorsey wilds of western Ireland. It's set in the futuristic 2054, but could just as easily be 1954 given the fluidity of time and the nostalgia for long ago when Gant had the running of the Back Trace, a labyrinth of streets filled with grog shops, noodle joints, fetish parlours, needle alleys, dream salons, and power haunts. B [...]

Whiteknuckled and gaptoothed, City of Bohane is a rickety plot careening across the lurid, sentimental, and predominantly one dimensional lives of its characters. Without going into too much detail the novel derives license to shock from its minimal science fiction affiliations and a clear fascination with the rougher parts of life from an extrapolated and grotesque version of a perception of West Irish poverty. Is the book fun? Yes, especially if you delight in finding twelve different ways to [...]

The NY Times review was laudatory for this debut novel praising it for its originality and beauty of language. After reading it, I could not agree more. Kevin Barry belongs in a top row of authors who use the language as if it were an instrument. The shimmering prose dances across the page in rhythmic pirouettes brightening everything it touches. Imagine Mad Max with its strange characters and unique dress in a futuristic time in a ravaged, deranged city in Ireland.I've often thought of people l [...]

I picked up City of Bohane in a flea market for £2 - an absolute STEAL considering how much I enjoyed it.It's a tricky read to begin with, Barry wastes no time plunging you into his richly imagined Bohane and I sometimes struggled to understand the odd dialect of the cities natives. However, I persevered and I was soon hooked - I devoured the book over the course of a long weekend in Wales, and I heavily recommend setting aside a day or two just to read it all in one go - it requires that degre [...]

At first I loved it. The language, the dialogue is amazing, and really new, as in not like anything I have read before. I did find fault with the story line, the twist seemed ridiculous. So the plot couldn't carry the good language, because for me the language even got tired, because it did not evolve, and the weak plot left it stagnant. The stereotypes, the misogyny, the bad mouthing all just started to feel vacuous. The author, clearly, has a gifted ear for sound and language. But he isn't ver [...]

I ate this book ravenously, despite my ongoing [fruitless] effort to go slowly, so I could linger with the delicious sentences. It was an utter delight, from beginning to end, and even though I know I missed so much of the subtlety because I know no Irish slang, it made me laugh and wince and flinch and feel the longing. I just finished it and am starting it again, right now.I wish I could write a more sophisticated review, identify flaws and weaknesses, but I can't. I loved everything about thi [...]

I'm lucky. Kevin Barry read to me before I read him, so while I was reading this I could hear him and see how he moves while he's reading, how he smirks and squints with his characters. But I reckon I'd have found it as fabulously entertaining anyway. More thoughts (and a video) are here jen-squire/201

I made another stab at finishing this book and failed. Between the unlikable characters,the strange language, the long continuous gang fight and unreal background I found nothing that would hold my interest. A somewhat failed attempt at a first novel, or maybe it's just literature.